Tracks

Men Thinking Women Ways

So often in song, we hear about the rough times that the men are going through, trying to connect with and land girls. We hear about all of the misery that's been had and is being dealt with in trying to keep ladies interested, get them interested or just to keep them happy and pacified. It's a full-time job and there are an impossibly high number of different scenarios and ways that everything can be thrown off the tracks, but really, hearing the majority of these songs from the male's perspective, it leaves us very certain that there are holes in the story. Men are liars and fabricators. They are pompous and they prop up what they consider to be the truth with all kinds of flimsy speeches and asides. It's usually an overly dramatic account of what really happened or a watered down one, giving only partial credence to the relationship. And we're okay with these. We often love these accounts for they've formed the basis for standard pop and indie rock songs for generations and who is to argue with history and the way it's written. New York band The Dig goes about these tellings in a slightly different way at times, giving us examples of these women in vengeful states, or contemplating their mucked up situations, with all of the conniving wheels a-turning to get out from between a rock and a hard place without losing their shirts and tails. There is the big sister and little sister in "Two Sisters In Love," with their hearts on fire, feeling a bond that doesn't just border sketchiness, but it vaults right past it into a category all its own. It gets wild and the joyride - sounding a bit like Richard Swift and White Rabbits in its atmospherics - takes a terrible turn for the worse. The improperness of the scene gets the best of them and the hearts began to flutter disastrously. It became too much to deal with. Then, you have the guttural sounds of "She's Going To Kill That Boy," spooling out like a murder ballad a la the ones that the Toadies used to do so well, the seemingly inevitable revenge and justice being delivered exactly, if not swiftly. It's the man who's gonna get what he deserved and he might not be all that pleased with it. It sounds as if it's going to be torturous and yet none of her actions should come as any kind of surprise. All that we'd need to do to learn that is to listen to the songs that the boy might have written about this girl and that girl. She's gonna kill him "with a head full of static noise," suggesting that he's not going to recognize that any of it's coming his way. It's an interesting perspective that The Dig (singer David Baldwin, singer/bassist Emile Mosseri, keys player Erick Eiser and drummer Jamie Alegre) bring to their songs, finding the most fascinating meat at the other end of the bone - taking it from the place least considered. They still write about "man" things - for instance in "Sick Sad Morning," when Mosseri sings, "I'd give it all to lie here with you," where we can glimpse his intentions - but entering the chamber of smoke and mirrors, or guesstimating on what could be found in the souls of women as they battle love is tasty all the same.